Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Daily Archives: August 16, 2017

We are getting an August update this year, which I found a bit surprising. And they even kept the naming consistent for three months running. If they hit four that might be a record. Anyway, lots of people at CCP are generally on vacation during July and August, so the month has been skipped at times for lack of content to deliver.

Not this August though, this August we’re getting some… stuff… I think… even if it was delayed a day.

We got a new event. As a follow on to The Agency event, we got the Lucky Clash event starting today.

I want to say Lucky Cash… or LSMFT

This event pits the Independent Gaming Commission against some pirates known as the Redtail Sharks, and the IGC needs your help fighting them off. So from now through August 23rd you can join help defend the various IGC gambling dens around New Eden from the Redtail Sharks.

So now we’re defending casinos again? I wonder if that was accidental or deliberate irony.

Anyway, check your overview… and then go fix the settings… to find a site to defend near you.

After that, well, CCP giveth, and CCP taketh away. The other big item in the August update, as CCP announced last month, is the removal of the Captain’s Quarters from stations in New Eden.

Me in the Captain’s Quarters back in 2011… the last time I used them

The source of much of the Incarna drama, the captain’s quarters were too much or not enough of something, depending upon whom was speaking. In the end, walking in stations ended with the rejection of the Incarna release and the Captain’s Quarters have been mostly lingering ever since.

No, six years later, they are being removed from the game. CCP posted a dev blog as to why they were doing this, but the upshot is that the code takes dev time to maintain and it is standing in the way of a 64-bit client.

As somebody who went through three Fortizar fights in the last week or so, each of which would have been made better by having a 64-bit client… unless you turn down graphics the current client is likely to access all the memory it can and then crash… I applaud this decision. We’ve had 64-bit processors and 64-bit operating systems for a decade now, time to move the client forward.

I know, somewhere, somebody is really mourning the passing of the Captain’s Quarters. One of my iron laws of MMORPGs is that any feature, no matter how bad, tangential, or useless, is somebody’s absolute favorite feature, and you’ll find out who the moment you remove it. Sorry you have to take one for the team, but dealing with what tends to be called the “technical debt” of old features is painful, and sometimes you have to drop a feature to move forward.

And so it goes.

After that the August release is just fixes and adjustments to things already in the game.

There were some tweaks to how citadel launched void bombs work:

Reduce the rate of fire of the Structure Guided Bomb Launcher from 20 seconds to 40 seconds

Reduce the area of effect of Guided Void Bombs from 40km to 20km

Reduce the neut amount per second of the Guided Void Bomb by 25% (6000GJ every 40 seconds as opposed to the previous 4000Gj every 20s)

Reduce the velocity of the Guided Void Bomb by 20% (increasing flight time to keep the range the same)

That, however, is not going to be enough to change the structure shooting meta. You will still have to attack them with a fleet doctrine that can shoot when neuted out, so armor tanked Typhoons or Machariels or Hurricanes supported by cap-chaining Guardians will still likely be the only options against slower shooting, but harder hitting, void bombs.

Meanwhile, deploying Upwell Structures has been made a bit easier, and using them has been made more attractive as some of the bonuses for the soon-to-be-removed player-owned starbases have been removed. Industry and reprocessing bonuses are gone.

The beta map is another one of those features that makes my head hurt. One of my long standing gripes about EVE Online has been that the in-game map isn’t very useful.

It is pretty, and hella impressive to show your non-playing friends, but it just isn’t very practical as an in-game tool. And I say that even today, with the current map, which is a vast improvement over the state of the map back when I started playing EVE.

Seriously, I went to DOTLAN yesterday and got a database error when I tried to look up a system and my heart about stopped. The idea of not having that out-of-game map resource, and being stuck with the in-game map, was painful to even consider.

And then came the beta map, the plan for which seemed to me to be “let’s make something prettier and more impressive to look at, but even less practical to actually use.” And so the new map has lingered as the beta map for a few years now, because it was clearly a step back from the already impractical in-game map in terms of usefulness.

But CCP seems to have decided to get back to work on the long neglected beta map. The list of changes is long and impressive. Somebody spent some time on the project recently. But is that enough to make the beta map useful?

There are a pile of other small fixes that have gone into the August update. Details are available via the Patch Notes and the Updates page.

The edge was clearly coming off the contest. Not only was Liore so far out in front as to be unassailable, but even in the pack changes in overall standings seemed unlikely. Add in a week with no blockbuster launches and it was no wonder that two people forgot to even make their picks for the week.

Yes, there were a few new movies this past weekend, but when you have been through weeks with 50, 70, and even 100 million dollar openings, the opening of Annabelle: Creation, predicted to be in the $25 million range isn’t exactly stirring. Plus I knew nothing about the film. Still, I had a $1,000 budget and eight screens to fill, so I went down the list trying to make a stab at some sort of line up.

In the end, for no good reason, I decided an all female leads theme was the way to go, so I went with two screens of Annabelle Creation, a screen of Kidnap, two screens of Atomic Blonde, and three screens of Wonder Woman.

As the weekend estimates came in, it looked like Liore was going to win another week. She only went with one screen of Annabelle Creation, but she had three screens of The Glass Castle, which looked likely to get the best price/performance boost of $2 million per screen, enough to boost Liore ahead of the pack yet again.

And then the final numbers came in and Annabelle Creation, which beat estimates by $10 million, ended up being the best price/performance pick of the week, bolstering my selection and pushing Liore down into third place for the week, behind myself and Ocho.

My Week 11 Picks and their Revenue

I won the week, the rankings shaking out as:

Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $92,413,326

Ocho’s Octoplex – $91,063,841

Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $85,743,232

Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $77,611,192

Void’s Awesomeplex – $75,807,974

Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $74,817,084

Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $74,252,899

Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $66,138,438

Bel’s House of Horrors – $26,866,850

Murf’s Matinee Mania – $14,924,605

Bel and Murf both failed to pick, so rolled with the previous weeks picks, which left them each with two empty screens as some of their picks were no longer on the list.

Nobody in our league got the perfect pick of the week, which consisted of two screens of Annabelle Creation, three screens of the Glass Castle, a screen of Planet of the Apes, and two screens of Wonder Woman. 261 people managed to get the perfect pick overall on the site, which netted them $99,547,100.

Perfect Picks for Week 11

As noted, there isn’t much that can be done at this point to shake up the rankings, save forgetting to pick for a couple of week. At the end of week 11 the overall seasonal rankings looked like this:

Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $1,179,773,786

Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $1,099,976,348

Ocho’s Octoplex – $1,015,911,862

Void’s Awesomeplex – $983,919,075

Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $959,423,735

Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $944,970,871

Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $926,427,978

Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $853,353,980

Murf’s Matinee Mania – $833,121,646

Bel’s House of Horrors – $799,170,850

The only change in ranking was Syl climbing up another spot after Murf failed to do his picks.

Beating Liore by about $7 million this week still leaves me $80 million behind. That is way too much ground to cover with only two weeks remaining, and all the more so when one looks at the week 12 line up.

On the bright side, I suppose, there are no $5 titles on the list. However, there also isn’t a single title ranked over $300 either, making it look like a pretty thin week. I’ll be lucky to get $80 million out of these picks, much less close the gap between Liore and myself.